all good deeds

They carried on the fight with it – the soulless machine leaping from rock to rock, flying through the air and swooping down, but rarely daring to engage them in a direct attack any longer. It must have figured out they were wise to such a dive-bomb maneuver now that it had been used twice.

Berg, through his destroyed face, could only lay behind the car in pain next to the hobbled Yancy – both men had the entirety of the gang's sterile bandages upon them and it was not enough to bind all of their wounds.

Berg had his mind back, and the redness. In the expanding dusk, he had one red eye and the other curiously dulled. It had not yet dawned on him that this eye had gazed upon its last image – he assumed it was closed and couldn't open, and he did not think too hard about any of it.

Finally one of them hit the bird as it perched on a rock – winging it in the side. It responded with the high-pitched shriek again, capered about on the rock as if to take off but couldn't. Yancy wailed something out, leaped from cover, and fired the shotgun off.

The falcon caught the shrapnel and sailed off the rock, seeming for a moment to hang brokenly in the air. It struck the ground with a shattering noise – bits and pieces of itself drawing out some strange meaningless pictograph across the alkali.

I got it! I got the sumbitch I...

Shudfugup. Gimme the licker.

One of the others dropped down to his knees next to Berg and handed him off the canteen full of grain alcohol. Berg brought it to his lipless teeth and drank in the numbness. Coughs tearing his lungs apart from the inside. Warm flecks leaving his mouth from deep within him, and he had to hope it wasn't blood.

Berg, what about the girl? We don't know where...

Fug the girl. Fug fix me up.

The sun was sinking. As the two unharmed tended to Yancy and Berg, the grandmother sat in the passenger seat of the car, clearly expecting somebody to start driving. Harrumping and looking impatient as one of them would pass by, and they ignorant of her scorn.

---

The man on the horse racing toward all of it heard something from the mind of the broken bird, echoing from within that form crucified on the ground.

Status of Subject Fox unknown. Subject George is hostage. Hostile combat capability sixty percent. Four tangos. System has sustained damage outside of regular operational parameters. Initiating safe shutdown procedures.

He took the ear bud out and stowed it, kicking the horse's ribs a final time and leaning forward in the saddle as together they traversed the dusty expanse with the speed of a hawk's telltale shadow.

---

Pain thudded through all of them with a dullness that lacked specificity of any kind. Berg's mind sank into slumber and the pain clawed his mind out of it. Night fell and he was vaguely aware of the three of them starting a fire.

How he gonna head us up with no fuckin' face?

Yancy, shut up.

I'm just sayin'. How he gonna shoot with one fuckin' eye? How he gonna talk with no lips?

He's got the redness better'n we do. He's...

Fuck his red and fuck him. You know what Shep'd do.

Berg forced his eye open and fixed it on Yancy. Tried for some threat, but the pain in his head wouldn't let him form anything. Watched as the three of them stood over him, talking. The looks on the faces of the two others dubious and unsure. Yancy's speech disappearing in the depth of Berg's agony and he only had Yancy's wild gestures with the shotgun and the look of frothy glee on the man's face at the thought of murdering him.

Wait... what was that?

What you fuckin' talkin' about?

Sh! Fucking idiot, cork it for a sec...

The sound echoed from somewhere in the west – the voice low and mournful before spiking up again.

Do you don't you waaaaaaaant me to love yooooooooooou?

They clustered by the car all of a sudden, except for Yancy, who stood his ground.

Hey what the fuck is...

Three crunches in a row so quick as to be a single one. The head snapped back at the same moment the left shoulder seemed to try to jump away from the body and the stomach popped open. It was only a split-second after the bullets struck that the crackcrackcrack drifted from the great expansive dark surrounding the camp.

Blood dribbling down the whole front of his body, the rivulets joining one another and becoming a torrent on the alkali as he took a half-step back. Tried to lift the shotgun. A sneer of effort that turned into a whimper, and he fell to his knees and sagged forward, and the last revelation for him was that he'd shit his pants.

The shots had come from the east, but the voice came from the north, and it was a vaudevillian singer.

Oh you don't say fuck in the presence of a lady! / No you don't say fuck to a gaaaaaaaaal! / And though it slips out most times 'fore you know it / A proper-fine gal won't ask you to show it / and sure m'friend as shit she don't offer to blow it / if you drop an eff bomb on a gaaaaaaaaaaaal!

Berg tried to get up, but didn't have the strength. The other two were loading up their AKs, and god damn it, Berg couldn't tell them to stay calm, couldn't tell them that the bastard was clearly using a silencer, that the cracking was no report but the sound of the bullets going supersonic...

All the while the voice coming from a different direction each time. They sprayed into the dark, shouting at him to reveal himself, and after each volley he would snicker from the southwest or mock them from the north.

A whisper, directly behind them, the voice snarling and gravelly and filled with rage, savoring every word.

Tell me what thy name is on the night's plutonian shore.

They whirled around and fired themselves empty. As the last bits of brass clinked to the ground, they heard his boots on the hardpan behind them. When they turned, they saw him step into the light from behind another rock, the gun in his right hand, aiming from the hip, the left hovering over the hammer and a silencer screwed onto the end of the barrel.

They dropped the guns – one of them held up a hand.

Please –

—kill you? Not a problem.

A brief storm of high-pitched hisses, and they fell to the ground next to one another. Berg could not see the tall gunman's face as he approached the car, the fire backlighting him and leaving all in shadow.

The old woman's voice snapped from the car.

When are we going?

He gestured toward her with the gun without even glancing at her, the movement nonchalant and ingrained in muscle memory. A single sharp hiss. Berg felt the car jerk with her movement, and the clerk did not believe that those parts of her that were left on that sullen, resigned earth joined those already redeemed in their ascension. The round had no time to break the sound barrier and so no crack followed to mask the rattle of her final exhalation.

Berg found he could not move as the clerk stood over him with the pistol, carefully unscrewing the silencer and slipping it back into a pocket on the inside of his coat. With his thumb he slid open the loading gate and his fingers got to work on unscrewing the extractor, and he stood over the man Berg as the bullets clinked across the ground one by one.

He spoke as he started clicking more bullets into the gun.

I'd say I'm sorry I had to do that, but the world's a distrustful enough place as it is without us all lying to one another. Incidentally, that's also why I won't say it wasn't the most damn fun I've had in who knows. Now, what I will say though, and you need to believe me when I say it because I mean it – is that it was not my intention for Sal to go for your face like that. You just went after my little friend so fast it completely slipped my mind to tell him not to do that. Speaking of old Sal, I realize you and your buddies there did what you all had to. I can ask neither more nor less of a man. Well... I do suppose I can ask that a man refrain from destroying a helpless girl's car and planning on either putting his penis in her or handing her over to people that'll surely do the same... then again, things are different than when I was a boy, and who's to say what new societal mores have arisen in these freer times, what with flappers about on the street without so much as a respectable man to escort them, and ladies who have a condition walking about like it's nothing to be embarrassed of, and other such advances that reveal my latent nineteenth-century misogyny... I seem to have lost my train of thought.

Don' kill me...

The Koran tells us that for every man there is a purpose that drives his life, and that yours should be the doing of all good deeds. You have lived your whole life and done the precise opposite of that.

'm surry.

Strangely, I am too.

The bullet put out Berg's remaining eye. It bled only for a moment and then stopped. The clerk dropped the gun, and it dangled lazily down at his side again. As if twiddling its thumbs and whistling, looking away from its murder as if to slyly distance itself from what it had done.

The clerk brought out a small flashlight and soon found the trail of blood away from all the others – the one leading behind the rock that had been Saladin's last stand. She lay in a fetal position, curled up, hands covering a wound to the stomach. She was shivering violently. He took her in his arms and reached into his pocket for the pill bottle.

He put the pill in her mouth and massaged her throat until she had swallowed it. He kissed her forehead.

Not going to let you slip away just yet, little friend. I'm not as merciful as all that.